Tariffs will lead to political discord if not another Civil War? (also unions and immigration)
I’m halfway through The Industrial Revolution by Patrick Allitt, a historian who was born in England and got a Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley (so he knows both sides of the Atlantic quite well).
His short explanation for the American Civil War is that it was primarily over tariffs, which benefitted the industrial North and harmed the agricultural South.
Tariffs and trade wars are back in the news these days. Will higher tariffs lead to internal political discord within the U.S.? If so, how will the lines be drawn? The North-South split no longer makes sense when it comes to manufacturing. This map shows that Alabama and the Carolinas have a larger share of their economies devoted to manufacturing than New York or Massachusetts.
Separately, the historian says that immigration to the U.S. (mostly from southern and south-eastern Europe) and to England (mostly from Ireland) resulted in lower wages for industrial workers, often down to the subsistence level. Also that U.S. workers found it impossible to unionize and gain political influence to the same extent as workers in England because of the continuous flow of immigrants and lack of shared culture. Today, of course, we have voters who say that they support both expanded immigration and expanded unionization and/or higher compensation for union workers. The lectures suggest that these two goals cannot be achieved simultaneously.
Finally, the professor talks about how the industrial revolution led to a shift in economic philosophy. In a primitive society, he says, people have a no-growth mindset. The only way that people can get wealth is by taking it from others. Therefore there cannot be social harmony unless the rich people are constantly giving gifts to the average member of the society. In the 19th century, however, there was a shift to a growth mindset in which people expected to become wealthier via an expanding pie, not by fighting someone else for a piece. Somehow, at least in the U.S., politicians have brought a lot of voters back to pre-industrial thinking such that they’re obsessed with the gifts (taxes) being provided by rich people.
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